Causes and Conduct of Proxy Warfare

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel has been organized by a member of Section 19: International Security, Sara Plana, and the following participants of the panel are also Section 19 members: Kyle Atwell, Barbara Elias, Meg Guliford, and Melissa Lee.

Proxy warfare, a practice of international affairs in which states extend military support to warring parties, is again on the rise. Major powers and regional powers across the world are finding new ways of challenging one another indirectly—and sowing instability in their wake. All the papers on this panel tackle novel questions about the causes and conduct of proxy warfare, proposing fresh hypotheses, contributing new evidence, and employing a variety of methods, including large-N descriptive analysis and modelling and process-tracing of original interviews and archival and text data. The first two papers challenge the conventional wisdom for why states choose to extend support to states and non-state armed groups in civil wars. First, Noel Anderson’s findings from a new dataset of external meddling in internal wars dispute assumptions in the literature about the patterns of who conducted and who was affected by proxy warfare over time. Second, Kyle Atwell and David Logan explore the role that the possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons plays on the likelihood states choose to challenge their rivals through proxy warfare. The final two papers dive into the realities of how states that engage in proxy warfare manage relationships with actors on the ground in order to advance their interests—and what determines success and abject failure. Examining the context of state sponsorship of non-state armed groups, Sara Plana advances a theory to explain why some state sponsors are better able to control their non-state proxies than others, positing that the very reason states support these proxies can sometimes undermine their ability to coerce them, and tests these insights on the contemporary cases of US military support for non-state armed groups in Syria. Meg Guliford wrestles with how states can motivate other states during civil wars, emphasizes the role of domestic pressures in the patron state, and investigates these dynamics in the case of the US relationship to the Salvadoran government during the 1980s Salvadoran civil war.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• External Meddling in Internal War: Tracking Global Trends, 1946-2009 - Noel Anderson, University of Toronto

• How Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons Influence War and Proxy War - David Logan, Princeton University; Kyle Atwell

• How Do States Control Proxy Groups? Evidence from the U.S. in the Syrian Civil War - Sara Plana, University of Pennsylvania

• Deeds and Words Disconnect: United States Proxy Warfare in El Salvador - Meg Guliford, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Melissa M. Lee Princeton University

Discussants

• Barbara Elias Bowdoin College

• Joseph Harold Felter